The child was born screaming beneath a dead sun.
At midday, when light should have ruled the sky, the heavens dimmed instead—clouds curdling into bruised spirals, the air tasting of iron and ash. The villagers of Greyhollow knew at once that something had gone wrong. They barred doors. They doused hearths. They prayed to gods who had not answered prayers in generations.
In a shack at the edge of the moor, a woman bled onto the floor and begged to die.
"Don't let it breathe," Mara sobbed, fingers clawing the dirt as the midwife pulled the child free. "Please. I felt it watching me. I felt it choosing."
The baby wailed—loud, strong, alive.
Then the sun went black.
Not eclipsed. Not hidden. It rotted, collapsing inward like a burned eye, leaving a ring of dull crimson light around a hollow void. Every man, woman, and animal in Greyhollow fell to their knees as a pressure crushed the breath from their lungs.
And on the infant's chest, just above the heart, a mark appeared.
A circle of black veins, branching outward like roots seeking something to strangle.
The midwife screamed and dropped the child.
It did not cry when it hit the floor.
It stared.
They would name him Kael.
They would whisper it like a curse.
By the time Kael was six, three people were dead because of him.
The first was accidental.
A boy named Renn had cornered him behind the tanner's shed, fists raised, teeth bared in a grin too mean for a child. Kael remembered the words clearly, even years later.
Show us the mark, demon.
Kael hadn't wanted to. He never wanted to. But Renn grabbed his tunic and tore it open, exposing the black-veined circle burned into his skin.
Something inside Kael answered.
The world tilted. Sound vanished. Renn's scream cut off mid-breath as his body folded inward, bones snapping like wet twigs. When the pressure lifted, Renn lay twisted on the ground, eyes burst, blood leaking from his ears.
Kael vomited until his throat burned raw.
No one touched him after that.
The second death was deserved.
A drunken man—his mother's lover, briefly—decided the demon-child should be "cleansed." He brought rope and oil. He did not bring prayers.
Kael didn't remember what happened.
Only that he woke up naked in the mud, the shack burned to cinders, and the man nailed to a tree behind it—inside out, skin pinned like a butcher's hide.
Kael ran that night.
The third death followed him.
It always would.
At seventeen, Kael stood at the gallows of Blackridge, wrists bound, blood drying on his knuckles. Rain fell in thin needles, turning the crowd into a blur of hoods and hatred.
"By order of the Crown," the magistrate declared, voice shaking despite himself, "you are sentenced to death for witchcraft, murder, and consorting with forbidden powers."
Kael lifted his head.
"You missed one," he said quietly.
The magistrate swallowed. "And what is that?"
"Being chosen."
Laughter rippled through the crowd—nervous, mocking.
The executioner pulled the hood over Kael's face.
The rope tightened.
And deep beneath the world, something ancient finally opened its eyes.